The image below is a build sheet for a bicycle in Excel. I can save it as a MS Word table, and save the Word file as a web page. I can bring the webfile up on Firefox. There I can convert it into HTML code (by selecting the table and right clicking to "View Selection Source"), and then copy and paste this HTML onto an HTML board.

So, it works for HTML, but with WW's BBCode I cannot post it here retaining its table format and hyperlinks.

Anybody have a solution? It would be a boon to WW to have people be able to create their buildsheets on Excel, and post the results in a table format, as buildsheets want to be in a table.

Excel Spreadsheet

Copy and past spreadsheet into MS Word. Save as a Web Page.

Bring up the file in Firefox, highlight the table, and right click to "View Selection Source".

The HTML comes up, this can be copied and pasted into an HTML screen. How do we convert this HTML into something that can be posted in WW's BBCode?

Joined: Thu Dec 04, 2008 7:21 pmPosts: 796Location: down by the Jubilee River

That's much tidier. Unfortunately, tables in a phpbb forum depend on implementation of one or more mods to the core phpbb scripts, so that they either parse the html tags into html output (instead of rendering them as text, which is the default) or enable table-like BBcode tags.

While we wait for that, best bet is probably to upload a screen grab as image for people to read, and attach a copy of the table in csv form if you think somebody else might want to play with it.

Unfortunately, tables in a phpbb forum depend on implementation of one or more mods to the core phpbb scripts, so that they either parse the html tags into html output (instead of rendering them as text, which is the default) or enable table-like BBcode tags.

Geez, I wouldn't have thought that making a table in phpbb was such a big deal. There is no way to post a table without delving deep into the bowels of the core phpbb scripts?

mitre_tester wrote:

Best bet is to... attach a copy of the table in csv form if you think somebody else might want to play with it.

Is .csv an allowed extension? It would help if WW allowed .doc and .xls as allowed extensions, and we could easily share Excel buildsheets and templates.

Joined: Thu Dec 04, 2008 7:21 pmPosts: 796Location: down by the Jubilee River

Ritterview wrote:

mitre_tester wrote:

Unfortunately, tables in a phpbb forum depend on implementation of one or more mods to the core phpbb scripts...

Geez, I wouldn't have thought that making a table in phpbb was such a big deal. There is no way to post a table without delving deep into the bowels of the core phpbb scripts?

If you're going to be pedantic, a module, not a core, but still involves a degree of hacking by the BB admin.

Ritterview wrote:

mitre_tester wrote:

Best bet is to... attach a copy of the table in csv form if you think somebody else might want to play with it.

Is .csv an allowed extension? It would help if WW allowed .doc and .xls as allowed extensions, and we could easily share Excel buildsheets and templates.

Quote:

Allowed Extensions and Sizes

gtar gz tar tgz z zip

I suggested csv because it's universally importable into any spreadsheet app, not everybody uses Excel. You can also just include csv as inline text without breaking it. Whether you attach a csv or an xls file, I'd expect you to put it in a zip or similar wrapper anyway as a matter of politeness to our hosts, as both will compress a lot and so zipping them up will save server bandwidth.

You and I both know that it can be done, and that it should be done, but chatting amongst ourselves isn't going to get it done. You need to make your case to the board admin

I've appreciated your help, MT. I've written an email to WW HQ. What I wrote had links, but I don't want to have to re-do the links (lack of a way to post URL's is another topic).

Dear WW:

I've posted a thread on the WW forum regarding the pressing need for WW to have a means of posting tables. I bring it to your attention, as it appears that we would need changes at the highest levels of WW to do this.

If you look at posts of buildsheets, you'll see users composing work-arounds to post what should be a table. Like here. Or posting incomplete information (in this example, no weights for each component), or lacking components that would be obvious if a default table were available.

I've attached an Excel spreadsheet of a build I am doing. Using a spreadsheet is easy, and it adds up the weights. I've got the links to the websites that confirm the weight, part #, etc. There is a lot of information in such a format, but there is no way at WW for users to transmit such information.

* A way to build a table from scratch on WW.
* A way to post a table using HTML (which could be generated from standard programs such as Excel, Word, etc.
* A way to upload files containing spreadsheets and tables, so that other users could download them.

It would be much better, of course, to post the table in WW, rather than having people have to leave WW to see the details of a build, or in this case have to post a screenshot (which not everyone knows how to, or is willing to do).

A build list is not that long. Why go through all the trouble to convert..Resize the Excel window to show just the contents you need, then Press Alt + Prt screen in windows and copy the contents and save as a GIF.

What I did was the following:1. Grab the spreadsheet data2. paste it into a text file "text.txt". Columns are separated by tabs.3. Pipe through sed, converting spaces into underscores.4. Pipe into a script, which aligns columns

The "colalign" script isn't so pretty, as I did it before I knew Perl, and so it's in awk. It's confused by the multi-byte characters (Unicode), so a few columns aren't right. But it would be fast to rewrite in Perl -- just a few lines.

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